Butchers Hill (25 page)

"Just because you once worked for
my grandfather, because I was out front sipping sodas while you were in
the back, making burgers?"

Jackie looked frightened, as if the words
she were about to utter were so forbidden, so long unspoken, that she
wasn't quite sure what they might do once let loose in the
world.

"You have to help me because
Samuel Weinstein was my baby's father."

A
s
many times as she had been there, Tess always needed the marker of the
wheelchair ramp to find Tyner's house in Tuxedo Park. It was
so dark in his neighborhood on a summer night—darkness being
the perogative of truly safe places as well as the really dangerous
ones—and the shingled houses were virtually
indistinguishable. Hard enough to find the street, St.
John's, much less the house itself. Once she did, she waited
on his front porch, drinking from the international six-pack she had
assembled at Alonso's Tavern, where they allowed you to
mix-and-match the beers. A Red Stripe, a Bohemia, a Royal Oak, a
Tsing-Tao, a Molson, and an Anchor Steam. Around the World in eighty
beers.

It was past eleven. The velvety voices of
television anchors drifted from open windows, filling the night with
authoritative sounds. So emphatic, so sure. You didn't even
have to hear the words to know how a story was supposed to make you
feel. The pitch told you everything you needed to know.
Bad
thing had happened. Important thing had happened. Funny thing had
happened. Weather had happened
.

Shit happened.
Where
was Tyner, anyway
? Tess drained the Red Stripe.
She was halfway through Mexico by the time his van pulled up out front.
She called to him as he came up the ramp, so he wouldn't be
startled to find her on his shadowy front porch. But nothing ever
really surprised Tyner. Lucky him.

"Not a very good training
regimen," he observed, looking at the glass bottles at her
feet.

"Depends on what you're
training for. Where have you been, burning the midnight oil on Luther
Beale's case?" She couldn't help sounding
a little petulant, as if Tyner should know she would be waiting on his
front porch.

"Luther Beale is safe at home,
where I expect him to stay unless the police come up with something
significantly more substantial than the circumstantial bullshit they
threw at us all day. I had a date."

"A date?" She had known
women found Tyner attractive, but she hadn't known he
actually did anything about it. "Who is she?"

"Another lawyer. No one you
know."

"How old is she? Or should I ask,
how young is she? Young enough to be your daughter? Young enough to be
your granddaughter?"

"What an odd thing to
say."

"Not so very odd."

And she told him everything. She began with
her conversation with Jackie, veering off into wild digressions about
Willa Mott and Adoption Rights and the leather seats in
Jackie's Lexus. Somewhere in the middle of her rambling
story, Tyner reached for the Anchor Steam and the bottle opener, but he
never spoke. By the time Tess's voice wore down, the street
was silent, the televisions long turned off, all the windows dark.

"So I'm looking for my
aunt, I figured out," she said. "What's
that stupid West Virginia joke, the one about the song.
‘I'm My Own Grandpa?' I'm
looking for my thirteen-year-old aunt."

"Lots of people have aunts and
uncles younger than they are. Given the imperatives of biology,
it's not that unusual."

"Jesus, Tyner, there was a
fifty-year age difference."

"So?"

"So that's
sick."

"It was legal, though. She was of
age to give consent."

"He was her boss, which makes it
sexual harrassment. And adultery. Which isn't legal in the
state of Maryland, no matter how old you are."

"Does Jackie think she was
sexually harrassed, or is that your take on it?"

Shrewd Tyner. He always did have a way of
knowing what truly bothered her. She was the angry one, not Jackie. The
man Jackie remembered—a man she called Samuel, in an
affectionate voice that made Tess's skin crawl—had
been kind to her. If it hadn't been love between them, it had
been a genuine fondness, two lonely, unhappy people finding solace in
one another's company. He had given her gifts, encouraged her
to think about life beyond the grill at Weinstein's Drugs.
When she told him she was pregnant, he had given her money for an
abortion, which she had pocketed, knowing she was too far gone for the
procedure. He had even offered to help her with college, but his
business troubles had kept him from honoring that pledge. Still, Jackie
had nothing unkind to say about him. He had never promised to leave his
wife for her, she had told Tess. He had never promised anything, except
to provide her a corner of warmth and regard in a world that had given
her so little of either.

"She's crazy,"
Tess muttered.

"That's a possibility.
Or she could be lying. Remember, she lied the first time you met
her."

Tess had not thought of this and it was a
tempting out. Would Jackie tell such an outlandish story to keep Tess
working for her? True, she had known much about Weinstein Drugs, but it
was possible she had worked there without being bedded there. Perhaps
she had hated her employer and waited all these years to punish his
descendants. Tess allowed herself the fleeting pleasure of embracing
this theory, then just as quickly discarded it. Not even Gramma
Weinstein could have provoked someone into seeking such a convoluted
revenge. Besides, there was definitely a daughter out there somewhere,
Jackie had convinced her of that much. It suddenly occurred to her that
the strange detail Willa Mott had remembered about the father of
Jackie's baby was not his race, but his advanced age.

"I'd give anything if I
could prove this was all some sick lie, but I
can't."

"Why not?"

"Because in my heart of hearts, I
know it's true." Tess opened the Royal Oak.

"So what are you going to
do?" Tyner asked.

"I don't know. Even if
the whole thing didn't make me nauseated, I still maintain
she'd be better off with a more experienced investigator.
Being related to her daughter doesn't make me any more
qualified to find her. Besides, I wasn't bullshitting her.
Luther Beale has to be priority one, right?"

She looked at Tyner hopefully, but he had no
intention of letting her off the hook.

"Nothing's going to
happen with Beale, unless a witness comes forward, or some physical
evidence links him to one of those bodies. It was kind of sad about
Destiny, actually. One of the reasons they didn't make the ID
was because her body looked so used up. They were carrying her as a
Jane Doe, twenty-five to thirty-five, and she was only
seventeen."

"Well, as long as she looked
twenty-five, right?"

"Jesus, Tess. When you turn on
someone, you really turn, don't you?"

"I looked like a grown woman when
I was fourteen. Do you know what that's like? I
couldn't make it the six blocks from the bus stop to home
without fielding at least three offers to climb into
someone's car. Some of them left me alone when I told them my
age. Some of them, especially the geezers, just got a lot more
interested. Gee, I wonder why Poppa didn't invite
me
into the back room?"

"Just because a man would want to
be with a young woman doesn't mean he would go after his own
granddaughter. Give your grandfather that much credit."

"Sorry, Poppa's account
is closed. Gramma's, on the other hand, suddenly shows a huge
balance. Maybe that's why she's such a sour old
woman, because her husband was diddling the help all those years. I bet
Jackie wasn't the only one. Who knows how many undiscovered
aunts I have throughout Baltimore?"

Tyner reached for the Molson. "You
know, I'm probably as old as your grandfather was when you
were a teenager, right?"

"Thereabouts."

"What would you say if I told you
my date tonight was twenty-five?"

"You said she was a
lawyer."

"There are twenty-five-year-old
lawyers."

"Well…that's
different."

"Why?"

"Because she's older and
because—well, it's not like you're having
sex with her."

"No, but only because it was our
first date. I'm too much of a gentleman to make my move so
early. Or did you think we didn't have sex because
I'm in a wheelchair?"

"Of course not."
Tess's voice was vehement, for that's exactly what
she had thought. Sure, older men had sex and men in wheelchairs had
sex, but surely the combination disqualified Tyner. She
couldn't be more grossed out if her parents had started
talking about their sex lives in detail.

"Tess, tell the truth."

"Okay, that is what I meant. But
I'm drunk. Book me for TWI—talking while
intoxicated." She held up her wrists as if to be handcuffed,
and noticed her hands were shaking.

"Meanwhile, there's
Kitty," Tyner said, ignoring her outstretched hands.
"How old is her current boyfriend? Or how young, I guess I
should say. Certainly, she's been with men young enough to be
her sons."

"It's not the same. He
was in his sixties, she was a girl who
worked
for him. I don't care if she's not angry with him.
I'm
angry. I'm furious. There was a person I loved, and now
he's not who I thought he was, and I can't love him
anymore. I wish Jackie Weir-Susan King-Mary Browne had never walked
through my door."

Her words exploded in the night, as loud and
sudden as a car backfire. Someone shouted from a nearby house.
"Keep it down out there. This isn't Hampden, you
know."

"And this isn't Roland
Park, although I bet you tell people it is," Tess called
back. She was suddenly sick of Baltimore's little
hierarchies, as reflected in the rigid neighborhood system. Roland Park
looked down on Tuxedo Park, which felt itself superior to Evergreen,
where people fretted they would be mistaken for Hampden-ites, whose
feelings were hurt by the suggestion they lived in Remington, where
people sneered at Pigtown. On and on, down and down the social ladder.
Say you lived near the water tower on Roland Avenue and old-timers
asked: Which side? How silly people were, how stupid.

"Well, you're right
about at least one thing," Tyner said, when the night was
quiet again.

"Yeah? I must have missed
it."

"You've had too much to
drink. You better bed down in the spare room here, lest you add a DWI
to your TWI. At least the latter isn't a felony."

"Why not? It can be just as
dangerous."

The Patapsco looked deceptively inviting the
next morning, with only a few oily spots along the surface. Although
Tyner had told Tess to stay close in during her workout, she had
ignored him and headed down a narrow tributary, where she knew she
would be alone. Few other rowers wanted the hassle of passing beneath
the low bridges here, which forced you to bring in your oars, duck your
head and use the pilings as hand-holds to get to the other side.

She had not slept well. The beers, the
strange night, the strange bed, which made her realize how seldom she
slept anywhere except her own lumpy mattress. There had been times in
her life when Tess slept around, but she had never slept
around
.
She was a homebody.

Yet Jonathan Ross had found her anyway.

Your nightmares always know where to find
you, and Tess had been traveling with this particular dream for almost
a year now. At first, it was just Jonathan in flight. Lately, though,
he had begun to get up, brush himself off and talk to her. He seemed
nicer, now that he was dead, and she didn't think it was
because she romanticized his memory. She remembered all too clearly
what Jonathan had been like alive—arrogant, self-centered,
impeccable in his work, duplicitious in his life. Emotional
quicksilver. Not that she had absolved herself from responsibility for
the unhealthy bond between them. If he were alive, she'd
probably still be beating on that sick little triangle of theirs,
Jonathan running back and forth between her and his fiancee, trying to
stave off being a real grownup for a few more years. Tess, wary of her
own adulthood, had been a willing accomplice.

But Jonathan had gotten pious in death. He
lectured her, he hectored her. Not that she remembered much of what he
said in these dreams. Jonathan's appearances were like
hangovers, dull aches that left her feeling she really must behave
better next time, even if she didn't quite remember what she
had done.

You mustn't
be afraid of the truth
.

She came to another bridge, but instead of
pushing her way through, she held onto the pilings, listening to the
humming tires of the cars above her bowed head. Truth. If she had been
interested in truth, she would never have gone into journalism, must
less the detective business. She was a fact-gatherer, not a
truth-teller.

Here was a truth: she loved the little lies
she told as a detective, the license it gave her to nudge people along
with harmless falsehoods, a practice presumably forbidden in
journalism. Assuming there was such a thing as a harmless falsehood.
Little white lies. Could you say that now? Or was that non-PC as well,
implying as it did that white was better than black.

Little white lies. Big white lies. Poppa
Weinstein, kind as Jackie insisted he was, had sent her on her way with
cash for an abortion, soothing his own conscience. Now Tess wanted to
do the same thing more or less—send Jackie on her way, the
balance of her retainer refunded to her. All for her own good, of
course. There had to be better detectives, people with more experience
who knew how to do these kinds of things.